Friday, 13 April 2012

The World in a Cabinet, 1600s

Europeans extended their power and reach across the globe in the
16th century, collections of all sorts of curiosities and artifacts
from around the world became the rage throughout Europe. Inside these
sundry collections, called Wunderkammern or Kunstkammern
(German for “wonder-rooms” or “art-rooms”), geological curiosities,
such as geodes, nestled against South American feathered cloaks,
medical rarities, or a painting of Vlad the Impaler. One of the most
famous collections, that of the 17th-century Danish doctor Ole Worm,
contained hundreds of natural history items carefully arranged in a
room in his own home. Upon Worm’s death in 1654, the Danish Royal Kunstkammer,
created by King Frederick III of Denmark, subsumed Worm’s collection.
Luckily, a detailed catalog of his cabinet, written by Worm himself,
was published posthumously in 1655 as Museum Wormianum. This
book lists, classifies, and ponders Worm’s vast collection, offering
insight into Renaissance beliefs about the world as well as the era’s
emerging empiricism.

Worm trained in medicine at the University of Basel and practiced
“demonstrative teaching,” using objects from his collection, as a
professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen. Aiming for rarity
over comprehensiveness, Worm looked for objects that tested accepted
knowledge rather than confirmed it, explains Jole Shackelford, a
historian of medicine at the University of Minnesota. An illustration
of a bird of paradise, drawn from a specimen sent to Worm by a friend,
served as proof that the birds did indeed have feet, contrary to what
was popularly believed. As he explained in a letter, Worm aimed to give
his students firsthand knowledge of the world, to “present my audience
with the things themselves to touch with their own hands and to see
with their own eyes…”
Worm’s goal of illumination is reflected in the organization of Museum Wormi­anum,
which he separated into minerals, plants, animals, and man-made
artifacts. A horse’s jawbone embedded in an oak root—one of around 40
original items from Worm’s cabinet that are still on display at the
Natural History Museum of Denmark—represented the convergence of two
dissimilar categories: plant and animal. Worm’s categorization may
surprise modern readers: he placed man in the animal category, but
listed mummies under minerals.
Worm suspected a hoax when he realized that he only encountered
unicorn horns, considered a potent treatment for poison, and never
other parts of the unicorn skeleton. When Worm’s friend and Denmark’s
chancellor, Christian Fries, offered what he believed was an intact
unicorn skull for examination, Worm determined that it belonged to a
whale-like creature, most likely a narwhal. But Worm would also “pass
along hearsay if the source was credible,” says Shackelford. Worm
included in his collection an egg accompanied by sworn witness
testimonials, including a parish priest’s, claiming it had been laid by
a Norwegian woman named Anna Omundsdatter. When The Royal Kunstkammer was divided among specialty museums in 1824, the egg was boxed, sold, and lost to history.